Curiosity and courage, so essential, right? I think curiosity is a beautiful thing, we see kids that are curious and we all, they're asking questions, but what does it mean for us, it's the ability to regularly ask questions, especially why. And unfortunately, the older you get, the less you ask, but there is a group of people that are always asking questions and a group of adults that are always asking questions and they do pretty well with that mindset and they're called entrepreneurs. They're always asking questions and the idea that they came up with to launch a company to have the, the nerve, the guts, the courage to start a company with all that entails. It takes a lot and they do it by by wondering by questioning and probably asking questions that traditional companies and senior leaders and bigger companies, they no longer do. There's also a pretty practical thing you could think of here when you have a new hire coming into your company, into your business, into your organization, you hire somebody new. There's a real potential for fresh thinking, and what do we do? Well, if you're in any size company, you know what I'm about to say. When somebody comes into an organization, we want them to fit in, right? We want them to be comfortable, we socialize them into our culture and what does that really mean? That means that we crush their curiosity. We in a sense, say your idiosyncrasies, all of your history and your past, we want that expertise, but we want you to be part of us and part of our culture and we want you to to kind of start to see that everything makes sense here in terms of the culture, and so what we lose are these natural questions that newcomers, new hires will always have. I mean, I have a first hand experience for example, with a colleague of mine that we hired from another university maybe, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, really talented guy and his office was next door to me, his name is Ron and he would come in my office and he would say, Sid why do we do this here? This way at Tuck, Dartmouth, why do we do that, why do we do this? And I'm thinking, I had no longer quite, I had been on the job for probably 15 years by that point and I no longer was questioning because I had been inculcated into the culture and he's asking me these questions and I'm thinking, first of all I'm thinking stop asking me all these crazy questions. Then I calmed down and I realized these are good questions because when I'm starting to think the answer to why do we do this this this way when the answer is because we've always done it, you know you've lost the game, right? That's the worst answer you can come up with, that you've always done. Let's think about getting some type of return on curiosity. It's an interesting notion, right? A return on curiosity and create a situation. For example, with these new hires where we bring them into our culture, of course we do, but we don't want to lose the great stuff that they come, a freshness that they come with. So, great leaders must be adaptable, right? Consider the military special forces, those highly trained personnel assigned to the most dangerous and unconventional missions, the special forces, these elite units, they date back to Roman times. They select and train warriors for strength, for maturity, for motivation, for intelligence, like navy seals and others, right? Candidates who make it through to the end are incredibly capable. Yet it turns out that there's one characteristic that is make or break in the final analysis, the ability to adapt and adjust and think fresh in real time. That's what they've discovered in the training, and hiring, and onboarding of people that enter these elite special forces. And the final analysis, it's your ability to adapt and adjust and think fresh and there's an important lesson in there. If even that group is thinking about that, given all the other requirements. Let me give you one more example. And this is one that I've seen firsthand, I've worked with a lot of boards of directors over the years and advising them around board process and how to be more effective as a team and as a group. And I've also done a variety of workshops for board members and this topic of curiosity and courage, it really gets them going, because how often have we seen a situation where you see a company really struggling, they're going downhill and you're wondering, where's the board of directors? What are they doing? I mean entire activist hedge fund industry has grown up to try to address that from the outside. And so I asked these directors, well, who's speaking up? Who's asking the questions? What are you thinking? Are there situations when you're wondering what's going on? You're not really sure the CEO and the team is following the right path and what do you do about that? And there's such a common reticence to not speak up and that leads to some pretty bad results. And so I asked them to talk about that, and we end by saying, let's remember the two Cs if you're a board member, and this will apply not just for a corporate board member, but anyone with oversight. Actually, I could even go back to being a parent. You need these two things you want to be curious, you want to be wondering, you want to be asking, you want to understand the context of boards of directors, does this make sense to you? Is the CEO really going in the right direction? Does the strategy follow something? I mean, there are questions you want to ask and you want to think about, that's your job to do that, and then you have the courage to do something about that and both are required, I mean, curiosity just being curious, that's great. But if you don't act on it, if you don't have the courage to act on it, that's not very good. And courage by itself without having curiosity is probably not going to be a great ideas based on being open minded and being able to see things. So, curiosity and courage apply in lots and lots of areas including anyone with oversight, anyone with boards of directors. So keep that in mind. We have more to say on this theme, but curiosity and courage and can we maximize that return on curiosity and for that matter maximize the return on courage. Do we even ask that question? So lots to think about in this video, remember the three key elements that are part of a mindset of learning and change, open mindedness, curiosity and the courage to act on what you learned from that open mindedness and curiosity.
